Welp, I bought an iPhone again

Summary

The Vergecast — "Welp, I bought an iPhone again" (March 24, 2026)

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, host David Pierce and The Verge’s senior phone reviewer Allison Johnson dive deep into David’s months-long experiment of trying nearly every phone he could get his hands on—flip phones, foldables, even phones with keyboards—in search of something better than the iPhone. After extensive real-world testing, David lands back where he started: buying the latest iPhone 17. The episode explores why phone switching is so painful, why foldables still aren’t quite “there,” how Android’s strengths stack up against iOS, app ecosystem woes, and the promise and pitfalls of new AI features. Listeners get brutally honest, candid reflections on modern smartphone life, plus some philosophical musings on productivity, OS workflows, and how AI might finally make our devices truly useful.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

---

[03:44] David’s “Phone Journey”: The Search for Something New

• Experiment: David spent months testing alternative phones ("flip phones and foldable phones. I tried a phone with a keyboard... tried to go and see if there is something better than the phone everybody just defaults to." [03:50])
• Goal: Challenge the default choice of the iPhone and see what the current smartphone landscape really offers.
• Result: Came full circle and bought the iPhone 17 in sage. "I am medium happy with the phone in the same way that I was medium happy with the iPhone 16." [05:22]

---

[06:04] The Agony of Switching Phones

• eSIM Nightmares: Moving eSIM from iPhone to Android was "a 36-hour process" involving calls to Verizon and even mom’s authentication. "Nightmare, nightmare process." [06:25]
• Inherited Lock-in: Pain of switching locks people into a platform, even among Android phones (unless within the same “ecosystem”).
• App/Data Migration: Messaging apps especially (Signal, WhatsApp), Kindle downloads, account logins—nothing is simple. "There is this unknowable amount of things you have to do every time you set up a new phone." [07:07]
• Allison’s Reviewer Routine: As a reviewer, she simply “yolos” it and starts fresh each time, often just losing message histories. "I just lose all my messages every time I switch phones." [08:35]
• Comedic Moment: Parking app woes, repeatedly re-downloading and logging in while standing in the street, much to her husband’s dismay. [09:52]
• Takeaway: Painful transfers discourage switching, contributing to ecosystem inertia. "If I have to do this stupid transfer one more time, I'm going to lose my mind." [11:35]

---

[11:35] Why Foldables and Flippables Aren’t (Yet) the Answer

• Core Problem: Flip phones have a software problem; foldables have a hardware problem.
• Foldables (Pixel Fold): Too big, awkward; not “one hand” friendly; durability/camera mushy; but surprisingly useful as a big screen for reading. "If you could just make it a little smoother and a little better... it is more screen and I like the more screen." [13:20]
• Flip Phones (Motorola Razr Ultra): Hardware is delightful; software is terrible. Apps constantly ask for new permissions on the outer screen, and workflows are clumsy. "It's as if no one at Motorola ever closed the phone when they were developing this thing." [13:59]
• Samsung’s struggles: Allison notes it's even wonkier, requiring sideloading (Good Lock).
• Killer App Lacking: “There just need to be 50 more” useful features for the form factor to click. [16:15]
• Humorous Frustration: "I have brought up Gemini by accident maybe 45,000 times..." [16:15]

---

[16:55] Spam, Voice Assistants, and the Battle of the OS AI

• Spam Calls: Pixels/Android block spam calls far more effectively than iPhone. David: "I get maybe 10 times as many spam calls on an iPhone than I do on Android." [17:19]
• Android AI (Gemini) vs. Siri: Gemini is vastly superior. More reliable, conversational, and actually assists with tasks/searches.
  • "Gemini is so much better than Siri. It is astounding. And it kind of changes the way I use my phone." [18:21] — David
• Gemini's Task Automation (Allison's Beta):
  • Can, for example, order Starbucks for pickup using a voice command—though slow, “this is the future.” [21:09–23:29]
  • "My mind is kind of blown because... You can ask Gemini, order me a pizza and it's gonna open the app and do the thing for you. And it works..." [21:12] — Allison

---

[27:45] Little AI “Nudges” and Quality-of-Life Features

• Smart Suggestions: Android’s contextual nudges (e.g., “Add to calendar” from texts) are “awesome” and make the OS feel more helpful and modern. [28:04]
• iOS still has some wins: Autocomplete for one-time codes is smoother on iOS.

---

[29:42] Authentication: The Persistent Pain

• Day-to-day headache: Logging into every account is still surprisingly clunky—password managers, face unlock, fingerprints, etc.—and each platform’s system isn’t perfect.
• Pixel’s dual biometric unblock (face and fingerprint) earns praise.
• Amazon/Kindle/Readwise: Disparate experiences, failed logins, lack of inter-app awareness highlighted as recurring friction. [30:55–31:52]
• Browser/in-app separation worse on iOS ("Full nightmare.")

---

[33:11] Messaging Lock-in: Overblown?

• Leaving iMessage Not That Hard: David deregistered and used Beeper/Google Messages without much fallout. "Leaving imessage was not hard and none of my friends are mad at me about it." [33:11]
• RCS: Now good enough for most purposes, and group chats moving to WhatsApp/Signal anyway.
• Allison jokes: "You have better friends." [33:46]

---

[34:53] Android’s Superior OS Design (With a Huge Catch)

• Notifications: "Notification management is like half the experience of using a phone. And Android is really good at it." [34:53]
• Triaging Notifications: Android is more sensible, iOS is cluttered, and Apple’s “summaries” and attempts at AI sorting fall short.
• Other UI wins: Autocorrect, notifications/apps tray gestures, and subtle usability choices, all better on Android.

Memorable Quotes:

• "Android is easier to use. Like, I really earnestly believe that and I think is actually a saner operating system." [35:53] — David

---

[37:37] …But Android Apps Are a Disaster

• App Quality Gap: "Android apps are bad and iOS apps are good. It's the whole... It was astonishing... it is always better on iOS." [37:37]
• Why David Switched Back:
  • Many favorite apps (often the most innovative) don’t exist or are neglected on Android.
  • Even cross-platform apps are nearly always better on iOS.
  • "That was the decision." [42:19]
• Allison’s Candid App Reviewer View: Android gets late and buggy updates, even for major apps. [40:25]
• Sympathy (but not Excuses): Android’s fragmentation, infinite screen sizes, and Google’s lack of developer guidance create a mess.
  • "Google has spent a lot of time trying to convince people to make an Android app that works everywhere on all screens and all devices forever, no matter what, without giving people the requisite tools to do that very easily." [43:12] — David
  • Joke about “Richard” the summer intern being the only person assigned to the Android app. [44:23]

---

[45:01] Final Thoughts: Did David Make the “Right” Decision?

• No Regrets (Mostly): For as much as he liked the Pixel, his real phone experience is about the 200 apps he uses—and those nearly all run better on iOS.
• Allison’s Reviewer Take: For most people already in the iOS ecosystem, there's no strong argument to leave; the base iPhone is excellent and stable. [45:11]
• Foldable Faith: Allison continues to hold out hope for book-style foldables. "I'm not ready to declare the death of the. The book style folding phone yet..." [46:02]
• David’s Lament: “For all the people who are going to send emails and call the hotline and yell at me about this, please understand this is not the outcome I was hoping for. But I hit a point where there's a bunch of apps I want to use and I have to use the phone that runs the apps.” [46:38]

---

[50:28] Hotline Question: "If Workers Don’t Know Their Own OS, What’s the Point?"

Caller: Dax

Summary of Question:
Why are so many tech workers skilled at AI but don’t know basic OS workflows (like Mission Control on macOS)? Should companies expect more digital literacy? And can AI help us actually use our devices efficiently?

[52:40] David’s Answer & Productivity Rant

• Productivity Principle #1: “Everyone should spend 10 minutes learning their software.” Use YouTube for tutorials; explore settings.
• AI as Modern Manual: AI excels at parsing manuals and can suggest novel workflows for existing apps. For instance: "I need a way to quickly text myself reminders..." Prompting an LLM can uncover hidden features.
• Mini-apps via LLMs: Chatbots can also help create “small utilities” to automate day-to-day tasks (bookmarklets, markdown link converters, etc).
• Modern Bixby: Old idea — your AI assistant should help you use your device. New LLM-powered features can finally deliver on this.
• David’s Core Point: Don’t reinvent the wheel—most of the time, better understanding your tools (with or without AI help) can make your tech life vastly easier.
  • "My computer and the AI on my computer should help me use my computer, should teach me how to use my computer." [57:04]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Switching phones is awful. Like, awful, awful, awful, awful. And it's everyone's fault and I don't know what to do about it." — David [06:04]
• "It's as if no one at Motorola ever closed the phone when they were developing this thing. And it drives me absolutely insane." — David [13:59]
• "Gemini is so much better than Siri. It is astounding. And it kind of changes the way I use my phone." — David [18:21]
• "I'm running around the house trying to get my. Put socks on my kid and pack all the snacks... I frequently want to order a Starbucks... At that point... that is the time for this feature..." — Allison [21:09]
• "Android is easier to use. Like, I really earnestly believe that and I think is actually a saner operating system." — David [35:53]
• "Android apps are bad and iOS apps are good." — David [37:37]
• "I would rather on balance, like if you were just like, David, you have to take a phone out of the box, download nothing and use it forever, I think I would have picked a Pixel 10 Pro..." — David [42:08]
• "Once you open an app, you're at the mercy of whether that developer was given any time to work on the Android app." — Allison [43:12]
• "For all the people who are going to send emails and call the hotline and yell at me about this, please understand this is not the outcome I was hoping for..." — David [46:38]
• "My computer and the AI on my computer should help me use my computer, should teach me how to use my computer." — David [57:04]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:44] — Start of phone journey & experiment outline
• [06:04] — Switching phones: the pain and logistics
• [11:35] — Deep dive on foldables and flippables: hardware/software woes
• [16:55] — Spam call management, AI voice assistants
• [21:09] — Gemini’s task automation in practice
• [27:45] — Little AI nudges and quality-of-life improvements
• [29:42] — Authentication & password manager pain
• [33:11] — Messaging lock-in debunked
• [34:53] — Android’s OS strengths vs. iOS
• [37:37] — App quality chasm: why David went back to iPhone
• [45:01] — Allison’s synthesis and final verdict
• [50:28] — Hotline question: OS literacy, productivity, and AI as teacher

---

Episode Tone

Candid, geeky, and self-deprecating; full of practical, sometimes painful tech wisdom, punctuated with dry humor and the honest exasperation of veteran gadget reviewers.

---

For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode is an in-depth, relatable exploration of why smartphone choice—and the experience of switching platforms—is much more than just specs or UI preference. With plenty of storytelling and sharp observations, it delivers both practical advice and the big-picture realities of tech in 2026. Whether you’re an Android fan, an Apple loyalist, or just phone-curious, you’ll come away understanding not just the how but the why behind real-world tech decisions today.

Transcript

[David Pierce]

Welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of weird ideas about smartphones. I'm your friend David Pearce and I am sitting here reading this book, the First 50 Years by David Pogue. I got an advanced copy of it. Not to brag, but it is exactly what you think it is. It is an epic like 600 page tome all about the first 50 years of Apple. It's fascinating. There's so much in here that I didn't know. Like I, I, I have covered Apple so much as a product company, but understanding what was going on inside of the company and particular the ways in which Steve Jobs was both unbelievably good at his job and managed to drive absolutely everybody insane all of the time, it's just fascinating. There's so much interesting sort of internal machination drama in this story. It's very good. And even if you are somebody who knows a lot about Apple, a of lot, as I like to think that I am, this book is worth a read. It's the 50th anniversary of Apple. Starting next week, we're going to have a bunch of Apple coverage, lots to do, very excited about it. I got to finish this book in part so that I can do all of that coverage anyway. Today on the Vergecast, most of the show is going to be my conversation with Allison Johnson, our senior reviewer, about my phone journey. I've mentioned this a few times, but I've spent the last several months trying like every phone I could get my hands on. I've tried flip phones and foldable phones. I tried a phone with a keyboard. I just tried to go and see if there is something better than the phone everybody just defaults to. Right? I've had an iPhone for forever and was like, well, maybe it's time to see if it is worth the work to go get a different phone. Um, I've had a lot of thoughts. I have done a lot of testing, I've done a lot of phone switching and I just needed somebody to bounce some ideas off of. So I grabbed Allison and we're going to talk through where we are in the phone world right now. Also, we have a really fun hotline question about AI and vibe coding and how to think about what these tools can actually do for us. All of that is coming up in just a second. Second. But first, I promised myself that every time I sit down to read this book, I'm going to read a chapter without getting distracted by TikTok. And so far it's not going great. But I'm going to keep Trying. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

[Allison Johnson]

Support for the show comes from l' Oreal Group, the global beauty leader defining the future of beauty through science and technology. L' Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Ever had an idea for a business or side hustle but never actually launched it? With Hostinger, you can turn that idea into something real in minutes instead of weeks. Hostinger is an all in one platform that brings everything into one place. Your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores and custom apps with simple prompts, then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and grow your business. Go to hostinger.com vergecast to bring your idea online for under $3 a month. Use promo code Vergecast for an extra 20% off. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's acid compliant, enterprise ready and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start [e-mail] build.

[David Pierce]

All right, we're back. The Verge's senior phone reviewer, Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Alison.

[Allison Johnson]

Hello.

[David Pierce]

So over the last few months, I've been on this wild phone journey that I just imposed on myself because I was really bored of my iPhone 16. And unlike you, I'm not a phone reviewer anymore. So I'm not perpetually switching phones. And I think you and I both agree that when you are a phone reviewer, it warps you slightly. And I found myself in this place of like, okay, I've actually had an iPhone. Pretty much is my only phone for like four years now. And that's the longest I have gone without being a phone reviewer in a very long time. And I'm just sort of bored of the iPhone. It was like, okay, I don't review phones, but also I know a lot of people who will send me phones to test for a couple of weeks. So I just did that, called in a bunch of phones, I've tried a whole bunch of them and I've come to you with 10 observations. These are a mix of. I would say I have many, but this may be a six part podcast. We do, but I think I'm gonna tell you. Well, I'll just tell you where I landed and then I want to get into. I have this mix of, I would say, sort of hot takes about phones that I want to gut check on and then just a bunch of things I encountered that surprised me that I want to talk about. Does that sound okay?

[Allison Johnson]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

Okay. So my, my end point, just to. Just to say the upsetting part first, I bought an iPhone.

[Allison Johnson]

Okay. I knew, I knew that was coming.

[David Pierce]

This is, this is not frankly where I expected to land and as of not very long ago, is not where I was going to land. But I went out the other day and I bought an iPhone 17. It's sage.

[Allison Johnson]

It looks lovely.

[David Pierce]

Oh, great choice. I. I love the color. I am, I am medium happy with the phone in the same way that I was medium happy with the iPhone 16.

[Allison Johnson]

But you got that high refresh rate screen back.

[David Pierce]

I did. You're still wrong about the always on display, which is bad.

[Allison Johnson]

I love it. You don't. Did you turn just the picture off?

[David Pierce]

It's better. It is definitely better and it will. You can do it. So it mostly just shows you the time now, which is what I'm looking for and what I appreciate. It's better. It's still better on the pixel. But I think through these 10 things I have for you, I think we can, we can, I can start to explain to you why I landed on an iPhone. And then I want you to tell me if you think I made the wrong decision at the end of this process or not. Does it sound good?

[Allison Johnson]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

Yes. Okay. So thing number one, switching phones is awful. Like, awful, awful, awful, awful. And it's everyone's fault and I don't know what to do about it. So like just the very first thing I had to do, and I know you have to do this all the time. I had to switch my EIM from an iPhone to an Android phone.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh, God.

[David Pierce]

Nightmare, nightmare process.

[Allison Johnson]

Did it work?

[David Pierce]

It worked after I both called a person at Verizon and they were like, do you have another phone I can call you back on? And I was like, who says yes to that? Like, no, I have the one phone. What are you talking about? Like, this is my phone. I have the phone from you. What do you want from me? And they were like, oh, I see. I had to have them call my mom to authenticate the account. So I literally, I had to imessage my mom from my computer while my phone was off in order for her to authorize them. It was insane. So it's this like 36 hour process just to change my esim. And then I complained about this on the show, and I got messages from people who work at Verizon who were like, yeah, we know, it's awful.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, they do. They should feel bad about it. And I suffer through it. So that's why I just. I'm like, I'm on esim. I guess I'm going to have this iPhone for a little bit.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, no, it's. It's really true. And I think there is something about the pain of switching phones that is part of the lock in of it. And even from Android to Android. Right. So there's like, once you get onto Android, the switching process is much easier. So the first phone I tried was the Motorola RAZR Ultra, the flip phone. Because I was like, maybe this is the time when flip phones are for me, they're not. Which we're going to get to. But that switch was awful. And then I switched from the RAZR to the Pixel and moving the esim, there was like two taps. Couldn't have been easier. Terrific times. Um, but the process of moving all of your stuff, even though that's getting easier, still takes a while, whatever. But, like, you have to go and you're. You're logged into some things, but not to others. You have to do this horrible process of trying to transfer, like, WhatsApp data and Signal data, and that breaks in a bunch of ways. You have to. One for me is like, I. I have run out of downloads on some books on Kindle because I have to go in and manually redo this every time. So it's just like there is this unknowable amount of things you have to do every time you set up a new phone that with each of these. It took, like, most of a week before it felt like I was just seamlessly using my phone.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

How do you do this all the time? You do this all the time.

[Allison Johnson]

I do. So my secret is I kind of just yolo and I don't worry about the messaging apps. Like, I just lose all my messages every time I switch phones.

[David Pierce]

It's such a bad outcome.

[Allison Johnson]

It's so annoying. My friends are so annoyed. Cause I'll text them and be like, dude, I don't know, where's this show tonight? Like, who bought the tickets? It's somewhere. It's on. This information is on a phone.

[David Pierce]

Like, yeah. They're like, scroll up, Allison. And you're like, I can't. I really cannot.

[Allison Johnson]

They're used to it. They understand that this is how I operate. Yeah. In. In My method, I think, is a little different because I want to make sure I'm not, like, bringing some baggage from the previous phone to the current phone. So I just, like, clean slate, set everything up from scratch, which is worse and, like, better in some ways. I have the password manager. My life would be over if I didn't have the password manager to just, like, autofill everything. And, yeah, that's just kind of how I live my life. There's like, an awful two hours where I'm, like, logging into stuff, and inevitably it's the parking app. I end up on a street in Seattle downloading the parking app, and my husband's like, oh, my God, you have to do this again.

[David Pierce]

And you have to download it, and then you have to log in, and then you have to check your email for the verification thing, and God only knows what notification settings you have on your phone so you'll know whether the email came in or not. And then you have to go back. And that may or may not have worked because these apps don't talk to each other very. Like, it's. It's just. Yeah, the number of times you're in an app and then you go to the email client and then you click on the Verify link and it opens the browser and, like, nightmare.

[Allison Johnson]

Hate it.

[David Pierce]

And there's so many things. And part of me is like, okay, I'm not sure. I actually think it's a better answer to have all of that stuff so bundled together that I get a new phone and everything is just magically logged in. And there, like, there are security issues with that that I think are probably real and valid, but it really, like, switching phones is awful. Yeah, it's so awful.

[Allison Johnson]

I've been so desensitized, and I. I, like, offer therapy to my friends when they're like, it's time to switch phones. I'm like, you got this.

[David Pierce]

And I had this. I had the fun experience of being at the Apple Store, buying the new one that I bought, and I wound up basically just deciding to go through the process at the store, Right? Normally, like, I buy the thing and go home and do it myself. And this time I was like, I'm a normal person now. Let's do it with the Apple representative. It took two hours.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh, no.

[David Pierce]

It was not a good time. But. But I got to watch a bunch of people go through this. And there were a bunch of people who had come into the Apple Store just to update their software. And Because I think people are like, when I make this change, something is going to break.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And I'm kind of like, you're probably right about that.

[Allison Johnson]

They want to be in a safe space when it happens.

[David Pierce]

Totally. And I think the fact that that is the case and that's how people feel about getting new devices and new software is such a damning critique of the state of all of these things. Yeah, it's awful.

[Allison Johnson]

It sucks.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Like, I truly. I got to the point where I planned to do this with more phones. I wanted to really go down the rabbit hole of Android phones. And I got to the point where I was like, if I have to do this stupid transfer one more time, I'm going to lose my mind. Okay. So that's thing number one. Thing number two. You and I have talked about flip phones and fold phones a lot, and I think I've figured out what's wrong. I think flip phones have a software problem and foldable phones have a hardware problem. I think foldable phones are. They're still too big. They're still too clumsy for a lot of things. I think the. The. I've been using a Pixel fold and the thing where you can't functionally open it with one hand and still sort of. It's just awkward in a way that I don't think is right. And they have durability problems. The camera's not usually as good like this thing. If you could just make it a little smoother and a little better. I think the idea of it's more screen would be more compelling to me because it is more screen and I like the more screen. I do more than I expected, honestly.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. Did you use the Z Fold seven is my question.

[David Pierce]

I didn't. Samsung wouldn't send me one. Because you have one. Like, if I'm just being honest, that is what happened. They were like, alison already has one.

[Allison Johnson]

All right, I'll bring it to the east coast next time I'm there. But it's nice.

[David Pierce]

I also ruled out Samsung at the beginning of this because, just to be perfectly blunt, Samsung's take on Android is not for me. Like, I get that it's for lots of people, and there are lots of good reasons to like Samsung phones, but the way that one UI works on top of Android just feels like mess to me. And I have. I have never liked it and I still don't like it now. So I didn't even go very far down the road with any Samsung device. But I did try to get a Z Fold seven because I know you love it and you wouldn't send Me one.

[Allison Johnson]

I'm glad you tried.

[David Pierce]

So that's on the, on the foldable side, I think. You know, I keep saying there's no killer app for it, and I still kind of believe that. But I can open it up and it is bigger. To read on is cooler than I thought. It just is. Like, I enjoyed having big screen more than I expected, but the trade off of what it's like to actually use the thing didn't quite feel worth it for me. On the flip side, this is the right phone hardware. This is the Motorola RAZR Pro Ultra. I love the hardware of this phone and I get absolutely nothing out of using it.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh, no.

[David Pierce]

Well, so it's like you open it up and everything is like too tall and the keyboard's kind of wacky and nothing thing's in the right place because everything is still up at the top of this very tall phone and it just doesn't quite work. And then you close it and it treats it like it's a completely different phone on the outside. So it's constantly asking permission to use an app on the external screen. And I'm like, buddy, it's my phone. What are we doing here? And, and then you go to respond to a text message and you, you, oh, it opens up the keyboard and then you can't see the message anymore. And like it's, it's, it's as if no one at Motorola ever closed the phone when they were developing this thing. And it drives me absolutely insane. But I look at this and I'm like, there is something about this and the, like, quick bits of information that it gives you and the stuff you can do with it propped up like this on a table, taking pictures. Like, there is stuff here that works for me. It's just none of the software makes any sense there.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, it's wonky. And if you can believe it, Samsung's is even wonkier. I guess maybe that's a surprise. Motorola is at least like, we'll let you opt into opening an app on the outer screen, you weirdo. It's going to look all strange. Samsung makes you download Good luck, which is an adventure. Yeah, I know. I mean, I, I think I, I like the flips and tend to be a person who's like, I'm willing to deal with a little wonkiness. And yeah, the, the texting experience on the outside screen is not ideal and I don't want to write all of my texts that way. But I do do that thing where I'm like, I will actually respond to the text because it's just an option right there. And I don't have to, like, dive into the phone and become face to face with everything. I'm the worst for. Like, I'll see a text and think of a response and send it in a week when I get around to it.

[David Pierce]

Or never in my case.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, probably never.

[David Pierce]

A lot of nevers for me.

[Allison Johnson]

It's great. Yeah, my friends all love that too. Yeah, this, I think one of my. The camera being able to prop up and use the outer camera and texting from the outer screen are kind of my favorite things. But that was not enough to move the needle for you.

[David Pierce]

It sounds like, again, those are good examples. There just need to be 50 more of them for this form factor to really work for me. And it's like there's just so many little tweaks to bits of the operating system that don't exist. I also found I. I tend to. I hold the phone like. Like this kind of grabbed in my palm when I'm. When I'm just using it closed. I have brought up Gemini by accident maybe 45, 000 times in the process of doing that. Like, just constantly. It's. It's just right where your finger is. And then it's like, oh, I did Gemini again over and over and over and over.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Okay. Observation number three. This is just. I need a gut check from you on this. Purely anecdotally, but I get maybe 10 times as many spam calls on an iPhone than I do on Android. It was shocking to me how many of them went away, particularly when I was using the Pixel. And then I switched back to the iPhone and boom, there's this one. It's like a company that calls, wanting me to donate blood, that calls me like twice a day. Just gone for weeks thanks to the Pixel, and now suddenly back on the iPhone.

[Allison Johnson]

Like, yeah, totally.

[David Pierce]

Android's just better at this.

[Allison Johnson]

They are, yeah. And I think in iPhone settings, they've. They've provided more things, but you kind of have to. I could be wrong. I don't spend tons and tons of time on iOS, but you can opt to have, like, all unknown calls just disappear and go away. Or like numbers that aren't right. Yeah, that always scares me a little bit. Or I'm like, well, maybe someone's gonna call me from daycare from a weird number and my kid is bleeding and I need. I don't know. Yeah, things like that kind of scare me. Yeah, the. The Pixel and Android in general just Seems to be smarter about, like, either just straight up labeling it with a big, like, this is probably spam. Don't worry about it.

[David Pierce]

Yep.

[Allison Johnson]

Or just, like, not bothering you at all, which is good.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, yeah. I got back to near 100% just answering the phone every time it rang on Android, which has not been the case on iPhone for years for me. Yeah, it was just fascinating. Okay, next one. Gemini is so much better than Siri. It is astounding. And it kind of changes the way I use my phone. Like, I found myself doing things with the voice assistant that I would never even think to do on the iPhone because I would just assume that it's broken. Like, the joke now is you do things. You're like, you know, hey, Siri, what's two plus two? And it's like, would you like me to ask ChatGPT? And it's like, well, this is. What are we even doing here? So I have just sort of switched my brain off on all these things that I might do, you know, instead of like, going to Chrome and Googling something to get information, just asking Gemini for that piece of information. Siri is so bad at these basic things that I don't do them anymore. And they slowly started to creep back. Like, I use Gemini a lot on Android to control the phone, to do things, to open apps, to find stuff in the Play Store. Like, it is a good orchestrator of your phone in a way that Siri just never has been. And I think it's like, that might be, for me, the biggest single advantage of Android over iOS at this point.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. And it's wild because we've seen it happen in real time. Gemini was not great at first, and there was a lot of stuff it could not do. But in the true Google fashion, they've sort of fixed things and added things. Gradually. Putting personal intelligence in the mix has kind of blown my mind where, like a year ago, I would argue with Gemini about where my flight was taking off, and it would be like, no, no, you're. You're leaving from San Jose. I'm like, it is in my calendar. You can read my calendar. I don't need to do that anymore with Gemini. And it changes how you. Yeah, how you think about, like, finding information on your phone or just you're wondering something and you, you know, you can ask it. I find myself, like, when I switch to iOS, I have, like, I redevelop that muscle in Android where I'm like, I'll just ask Gemini. Or this is a Gemini thing. And then I look at the iPhone, I'm like, no, like, I can download Gemini, but I, I try to give Siri the benefit of the doubt and it just.

[David Pierce]

No, no, even, even if you asked Siri to open Gemini, there's like, it's like 60 40. It wouldn't work.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh my God. I didn't even think of doing that.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, speaking of which, actually, you, you've been using a feature I have not yet gotten access to on any of my devices, which is the task automation stuff, which feels like that's the next step of this, certainly for Gemini and also in theory for Ciri. How is that going? Are you actually doing stuff on your phone just by asking Gemini to do it?

[Allison Johnson]

Yes, I am.

[Dax (Hotline Caller)]

Both.

[Allison Johnson]

Like, my mind is kind of blown because it's the thing, it's like the thing we've been promised. You can ask Gemini, order me a pizza and it's gonna open the app and do the thing for you. And it's works on a phone that I'm holding in my hand that isn't like in a keynote. It is wonky. It will sometimes fail at things. It's slow. Like, like painfully slow if you watch it. Yeah. But the key things to kind of remember, like it's sort of, it's in beta first of all and whatever. It's designed to work in the background. So you tell it like, like my use case is I'm running around the house trying to get my. Put socks on my kid and pack all the snacks and do all the things I've like frequently want to order a Starbucks. At that point. That is the time for this feature is to be like, hey, order me that thing for pickup from my Starbucks. And it will do it. It's wild. Like, you can watch the phone use, use the phone. So I'm existing in two states of like, I don't want to oversell this thing. It is a little wonky and limited right now, but also like, holy crap, this is the future. You know, I, I say like, hey, I have a flight tomorrow. Schedule me an Uber to get me there on time.

[David Pierce]

Totally.

[Allison Johnson]

And it had a follow up question I had to answer, but it did it and it like did it right. I'm like, oh my God, that is very cool.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I was actually thinking about the food example. For whatever reason, all the restaurants near me use the toast app for pickup and stuff. So I'm, I have basically just like a run of every takeout order I've ever done in toast and just the idea of being able to Be like, order me the. The usual from the junction, which is the coffee shop down the street. And it's like, just take the. I try to time that as I'm getting in the car to take the kids to daycare so I can just sort of pick it up on my way home. And if, if I could just say that to my phone instead of having to put them in while with one hand scrolling to find the recent orders and do it like, that's the kind of thing that is a relatively small task. But if I can just offload the 12 taps, it instantly makes my life better.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, it sounds ridiculous. It sounds like an extreme first world problem. But once you do it and you see it, you're like, this is. This makes so much more sense than the way, like tapping around the phone. I ordered a Starbucks coffee from the wrong Starbucks when I was at the JFK airport. I ordered a coffee a thousand miles away. I welcome a robot doing that for me, like 100%.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Every time I go to the Starbucks app, it still defaults to California because that's where I lived when I set up the Starbucks app. We're doing, we're doing great, everybody.

[Allison Johnson]

You live there forever now.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, apparently. All right, let's take a break and then we're going to come back. And I have some more fiery takes to throw at Allison. We'll be right back.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business, it can be a lonely endeavor, especially in the beginning. And if you're just starting out, it's more important than ever to make sure you have the right tools at hand. If your business includes e commerce, a great next step is to try Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that millions of businesses around the world rely on to sell their products online. You can get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. If you're asking yourself, what if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find your customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24. 7 customer support. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today, you could sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com vergecast go to shopify.com vergecast that's shopify.com vergecast support for the show comes from granola meetings are a mess. A lot of circling backs and we're actually covering that in a different meeting. And whoever's in the car, can you please mute yourself? But for as messy as meetings are, remembering those meetings is even harder. Granola fixes that. Granola is an AI powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You simply take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes that meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. You need to do your job better. So if meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no brainer. You could try it totally free for three months. Just head to Granola AI Verge. That's Granola AI Verge. To get your time back, get three months free at Granola AI Verge. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether it's online, in a storefront, full time, or a side hustle, you already know how hard it can be to sell your product. A lot of the time you set everything up and then simply have to rely on hope you get noticed. Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell and connect around the things you love. On whatnot, you can go live and sell directly to people in real time. You show what you've got while buyers can watch, ask questions and purchase on the spot. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, Whatnot says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com sell to start selling. That's W H a t n o t.com sell whatnot.com.

[David Pierce]

All right, we're back. So back to my phone journey. All of the little AI nudges inside of Android I think are awesome. Like, and they're getting increasingly useful, especially for me in like text messages where if I'm, I'm talking to somebody about a thing we're going to do that evening, it just pops up a little thing that's like add this to calendar.

[Allison Johnson]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

Like those just these little sort of subtle nudges about like how to go find more information or add this to something or send this to somewhere or whatever. Like that is the kind of stuff that it just makes my whole phone make more sense to Me and instead of me having to like open up an app and then open up the other app just so I can swipe back to that one, look at the information and then you do the thing where you sort of half swipe so you can see both apps simultaneously so that you can remember the information to type it into the first app just to be able to hit the thing and hit add to calendar and it just moves the information over to the Google Calendar app and starts a new event. Terrific. Like insane that phones have not worked like this the whole time.

[Allison Johnson]

I know, I love it. And yeah, on Pixel it's called like magic cue and it's been a minute since I used it like regularly. But you get some funny kind of false positives where it's suggesting like, oh, you have a ticket to go park at the zoo parking lot in a week, like here, do you want that? But you just ignore it.

[David Pierce]

And yeah, they're tiny little. They're like little badges that pop up. Have not found them a nuisance at all.

[Allison Johnson]

Exactly. And when it's helpful, I'm like, oh, this actually is helpful because I was going to forget to put it on the calendar or I was going to put it on the calendar wrong. It sort of feels like when you see it work all the way through correctly, it feels like the first time you saw like a one time password fill in by itself and then just like submit. You're like, oh, this is. Yeah, this is easy. Like do this for me.

[David Pierce]

I love it. A thing by the way, that Google does not do as well as iOS. Like oh yeah, the, the Android thing is fine. You get the text message notification and it prompts you to copy the, the code, which is fine. But just the thing where it pops up and it's like copy for messages and you just go and it pop. It pops it into the thing and presses enter for you. Is like iOS is vastly superior in that way. But authentication is the next thing on my list. This is maybe my most esoteric phone theory at this moment, which is I think authentication is the biggest problem with day to day life of using a mobile phone. And this just has come up for me so often because I've had to log into things a million times. But one thing I love about the pixel again in particular, again I'm being very nice to the pixel and I thought for a very long time I was gonna end up picking a pixel because I actually like this phone a great deal. It has both face unlock and a fingerprint reader, which I think is awesome. Having that fallback before you get to your passcode is really useful. A lot of other phones have less secure face unlock, which I've mostly found really annoying. They're like, we'll unlock your phone, but we can't do anything actually important with your face. What are we accomplishing here, guys?

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. Then you have to re enter your PIN if you're going to order some food.

[David Pierce]

I don't care for any of that. But having the multiple things is great. But across the board, the password app integration is messy and not very good. Sometimes it pops up a suggestion, sometimes it pops up A, like open 1Password, sometimes it pops up nothing at all. You just don't know. And so the actual experience of trying to log into something is really annoying. And then when I'm in, like I log into a bunch of things with an Amazon account for whatever reason. Uh, like I, I use the Kindle app, I use the Amazon app. I use readwise Reader, which logs in with an Amazon account. Those things are all entirely unaware of one another in a way that doesn't make any sense to me. But it's like this, this phone has. I just typed in my Amazon password. This, this feels like it should make sense. And if I'm in the Amazon app and then it punts me to Amazon.com for some reason, we have to start this whole experience over.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

At least Android's browser is more aware of itself across apps. The whole like in app browser thing that on iOS every app has a different browser and you have to log everyone separately.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Full nightmare. But I think so many like little bits of friction for me in every phone experience has been just trying to be logged into things is so much harder than it should be.

[Allison Johnson]

Right. It's one of those places where I, I try to calibrate myself because I'm constantly annoyed by logging into things and I'm logging into things way more than any normal human should.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I've used eight phones in the last two months. This is not a normal.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, you spend 30% of your waking hours like logging into things. I've adjusted to the Android way of things, which is kind of wonky. It's like sometimes you have to tap the password field or long press it to get the autofill option and then maybe the 1Password chip will show up, maybe it's not and you're going to have to go copy and paste it. But yeah, every time I switch back to iOS that is one of the things I'm like, oh, this is so much smoother like it just the apps know when I'm trying to log in, it's. I always get the pop up for 1Password and it's. Yeah, life is easier.

[David Pierce]

Okay, I have three more. We're getting to the end here.

[Allison Johnson]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

One, I think messaging lock in is massively overblown as, as a problem for switching. Leaving imessage was not hard and none of my friends are mad at me about it.

[Allison Johnson]

Okay, good.

[David Pierce]

Just not a problem. Yeah, I missed a couple of texts. Our friend David Amel sent me a screenshot of a couple of text messages that he tried to send me that failed. But by and large I went to the website, I deregistered for my message. I switched my phones. It helps that a lot of my group chats have already moved to platforms like Signal and WhatsApp that are just better for those things anyway.

[Allison Johnson]

You have better friends.

[David Pierce]

I do, honestly. And the thing that really helps, honestly, and this is very specific to me, is that my wife uses an Android phone, so we've already broken all of our group chats together.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

Um, so I think it's definitely a your mileage may vary kind of situation. But at least for me, ditching imessage was not a problem.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And in fact, in a lot of ways was great. I switched out of imessage and started using the Beeper app, which integrates really well with Google Messages and that's like an all in one messaging app that I found really useful and was able to port across phones. The Google messages web app is really good. So like, I, I didn't miss imessage at all and no one yelled at me about it. It was fine.

[Allison Johnson]

Nice. I, yeah, it's way better than it was even a few years ago. And yeah, the group chats all basically work.

[David Pierce]

I I RCS I think has done a lot of the job. Like you can send good pictures, you get the typing notifications. Like, this stuff works.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. We're gonna tell our children one day about the days before rcs. Seriously, all the grainy pictures of them we sent to their grandparents.

[David Pierce]

Truly. Okay, the last two. And this is where we come to. Why did David buy an iPhone? I think on balance, I like Android better than iOS and I don't actually think it's super close. Like just at a pure out of the box operating system perspective. A thing that this whole experience made me realize is that notification management is like half the experience of using a phone. And Android is really good at it. It's very good at understanding what is and is not an important notification. It's very good at categorizing things for you in such a way that you can triage it in a way that's useful. It's very good at letting you manage what does and doesn't send you notifications in a way that Android is. Or that iOS is awful at. There's just a lot of little things. Like Autocorrect on Android is better than autocorrect on iOS. I think this sounds stupid, but the fact that you swipe down to get the notification shade and you swipe up to get the apps makes a lot more sense than swiping down from the top and down from the corner and down or from the middle. Like, there's just little. Little tiny usability things about Android that just make more sense. I think iOS is a much more sort of aesthetically consistent operating system, but I don't care about that. Like, yeah, Android is easier to use. Like, I really earnestly believe that and I think is actually a saner operating system. Like, I looked at my phone less on Android than I did on iOS. It bothers me less and that it means something to me. Am I crazy here?

[Allison Johnson]

No. The iPhone on my desk has been buzzing this whole time we've been talking. Nothing important is happening. Yeah, I totally feel the notification thing. And it is one of those, like, you just get used to it on Android and there's less things bothering you and you kind of don't even register it because they'll just appear as, you know, in the silent notifications.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I really like. I open it up and I swipe down and it's like, you got these 11 notifications from ESPN that we didn't buzz your phone with every single time. But here's some stuff that's happening that is like, that's actually a thing about push information that I like. And it's like, here, look. Here's a list of stuff that this app thinks is important. But we didn't bother you with it. But when you want to check, here's a little digest. That's a good thing. Like, yes, this is what notifications were supposed to be. And then we ruined it.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. I think Apple is just kind of pretending there's not a problem and they're waiting until they can fix it with AI because they're like, they have that. Yeah, some kind of a focus mode. Right. Where it's like, we'll just figure it out for you. You know, don't worry about it.

[David Pierce]

Summaries are bad. Apple Intelligence is bad. All of it is bad. Yeah.

[Allison Johnson]

I would rather have the deluge of notifications and not miss something important truly than trust Apple intelligence right now.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. But yeah, one fun thing about this project was this was the first time in a long time I have really settled into Android. Even when I've used other Android phones, it's like for a couple of days for something this was like I spent months using Android and like really got comfortable with it again. And it is better than iOS. Like I really, really believe that it is. Except, and here, here is the thing that did it for me. Android apps are bad and iOS apps are good. It's the, it's the whole I, I, it was astonishing to me how many times I encountered an app that exists on both platforms. And it is always better on iOS. Always. Like there are, the only exception is there are a bunch of things you can do on Android that you can't do on iOS. So like the pebble app for the smartwatches is better on Android because it just has a level of permissions you can't get on iOS. There are apps like Tasker that let you do things to the operating system that you're not allowed to do on iOS. That's all fine and good and I think a good case for Android again being better than iOS, but any one to one comparison I have, I literally have never found an Android app that is better than the iOS app, just on balance. And then there are a million great iOS apps that don't even exist on Android. This is why I'm back. Half the apps that I like and use every day, straight up, do not exist on Android. Or they're web apps or they're like half baked. You can tell somebody Vibe coded it in an afternoon and they were like this is for Android. Like the app discrepancy there I think shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did because I talked to a lot of app developers who were like, well there's a big audience on Android but there's no business in the Play Store. All of the Money is on iOS and like I intellectually knew this, but it, it feels sort of disastrous in comparison.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, it is a thing you, you like viscerally feel. And it is another thing I feel when I'm on Android for a while and I switch over to iOS and I'm like oh I see, okay. Like this is your app and you just kind of update the Android app like when you get around to it. Yes, I am constantly the person like the Android version of the Daycare app will break in some way and I am the person who fills out the feedback form to be like, hey, there's this bug. I'm not getting these notifications. And like, I don't hear anything back. Someone fixes it, but it's like they don't, you know, they are developing for iOS and things look beautiful and work, you know, wonderfully on iOS and then they, it's like the Android app is broken until someone is like, could you guys fix this? I can't buy, I can't check out.

[David Pierce]

And there's so many examples. Like the built in video players on Android are mostly bad. The little camera things inside of a lot of apps don't work super well. Like you're talking about. To me, there's so many apps that look like somebody built them for iOS and then like uploaded them to a website that was like, make your iOS app work on Android.com and just sort of did whatever happened there. They just shipped it as an APK and never thought about it again. And I don't know if that's because they think people who use Android don't have any taste or that they won't spend any money or, or, or what. But, but it is like the, the discrepancy in quality just absolutely blew my mind. And leaving aside the fact that like I write a newsletter about new apps and the single biggest piece of feedback I get from people is, why don't you cover Android apps? And the, the true answer to all of them is that Everybody builds their iOS app first and all of the good apps are only on iOS and it's just people, people don't like that. I don't like it. It's not the answer I was hoping for. But like in this period, probably a dozen apps launched that I was like into and excited about and couldn't test because they didn't work on Android. So like my, my iOS test flight is just like teeming with cool stuff that I haven't been able to touch in two years. And that's the thing, like I came to the end of this and I was like, I would rather on balance, like if you were just like, David, you have to take a phone out of the box, download nothing and use it forever. I think I would have picked a Pixel 10 Pro that is just out of the box. I think that is my favorite phone of all the ones that I've tried. Yeah, but that's not how it works. And in fact what I have is 200 apps on my phone that are actually my experience of using my phone. And 195 of those are either better than what's on Android or straight up don't exist on Android. And that was the decision. Yep.

[Allison Johnson]

And it's. Yeah, it's like a hate the game, not the player kind of thing where we're like, there's only so much that like Google and Android can do and they, they can make the system. The operating system is wonderful and as useful as we want. But then, yeah, the we are. Once you open an app, you're at the mercy of whether that developer was given any time to work on the Android app. When thought about all the different formats and screens and hardware that Android presents. And I think it is. I have sympathy for them, I have sympathy for Android, but it does. The sum total of it is like, it is cleaner and easier and works better on iOS just like just living your life.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. One thing I think I do blame Google for in all of this is Google has spent a lot of time trying to convince people to make an Android app that works everywhere on all screens and all devices forever, no matter what, without giving people the requisite tools to do that very easily. I think from what I understand from developers, it's very easy to make an Android app that sort of expands and contracts to screen sizes. And how to make an Android app that is sort of cleanly, successfully usable in all of those places, not so much. Whereas Apple is the exact opposite. Right. Apple is like incredibly opinionated about how you're supposed to make everything for every platform, which drives some people crazy. Because if you want to do something new and interesting, you actually have to fight this sort of system that is thrust upon you. I would argue that is a better outcome if what you want to get is a lot of at least pretty good apps than to just be like, God help all of you.

[Allison Johnson]

Right.

[David Pierce]

You can either have the out the outside of a Razer ultra or an 85 inch television. You figure it out. And that like, that's not. That's not it either.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Pierce]

And like maybe Google needs fewer screen sizes to care about or maybe it needs to just actually go all the way in on picking one between foldables and flippables and actually start to develop some opinions about how these things are supposed to work. Because until then, like, I don't know, the sense I get from every app developer is they have a whole team of people working on iOS and then just like Richard over there on the side building the Android app, and Richard is like a high school Student who's there for the summer and they're building the Android app and he has an iPhone. Sucks.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Allison Johnson]

Right. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

He's building it on his Mac and then just porting it to Android at the end.

[Allison Johnson]

He's mad. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. It's just bad. So that's. This is essentially where I've landed. Do you think? Did I miss any phones? Did I land in the wrong place? What do you think?

[Allison Johnson]

What a journey. Yeah. I mean, the iPhone 17, the base iPhone 17 is so good right now, and it is such a. I have people in my life who are. They've bought Samsung phones for the past 15 years and that's just what they're gonna do. I'm like, great. Okay. I know that's where you stand and that's what you want. If you are in the iOS ecosystem, it's so hard to argue for anything but, like, stick with it. Yeah. It's comfortable. All your stuff is going to work exactly the same way as it did on the last phone. And the base model is finally very good. I'm not ready to declare the death of the. The book style folding phone yet, but I'm glad.

[David Pierce]

This is. This is a good hill for you to die on. And I do believe you will die on it. But I respect the.

[Allison Johnson]

We all need one. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Mine is that somewhere inside of this razor is the phone that I want to use.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And no one will give it to me.

[Allison Johnson]

No.

[David Pierce]

And it's just a race to see if either you or I is right or if we just all up on iPhones again. I'm forward by this outcome. Like for all the people who are going to send emails and call the hotline and yell at me about this, please understand this is not the outcome I was hoping for. But I hit a point where there's a bunch of apps I want to use and I have to use the phone that runs the apps.

[Allison Johnson]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

It's not my fault, it's theirs.

[Allison Johnson]

That's right.

[David Pierce]

This is where we are. All right, Allison. Thank you. I needed to just get some of this off my chest and I appreciate you being here to do this with me.

[Allison Johnson]

I've been dying to know. I'm so happy to like absorb all

[David Pierce]

the emotions and if you do want to send me that Z fold seven, please do. And if it. I really hope that just blows my mind to pieces and we get to do this all over again.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. You're gonna have to start all over again.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. It's gonna be great. All right. We gotta take one More break and then we're gonna come back and do a question from the broadcast hotline. We'll be right back.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Every business has its impact, and with AI changing the landscape, the barrier to entry has never been lower. Whether you're starting a side hustle or building the next big thing, Hostinger lets you go live in minutes, not weeks. Hostinger is an all in one platform that brings everything into one place. Your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores and even custom apps without coding or design skills. Then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and help grow your business. Turn your one day into day one. Go to hostinger.com vergecast to bring your idea online for under $3 a month, plus get an extra 20% off with promo code Vergecast. That's less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. That's hostinger.com Vergecast promo code Vergecast for an extra 20% off. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible developer first asset compliant enterprise ready and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500, and that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start [e-mail] Build. Fox Creative.

[Hiro (Cat Voice in Ad)]

This is advertiser content from im's pet food. Hey humans. My name's Hiro. I'm a cat. I'm here to give you a crash course on how we went from fierce hunters to the flu. Goofy friends you can't live without. Although, let's be honest, we could probably live without you. Around 10,000 years ago, humans started farming, which accidentally created a rodent hunting bonanza that meant full time employment and activity for us. Humans were like, okay, these guys are chill. They can stay so unlucky, like dogs. Ew, sorry. We basically domesticated ourselves. We chose you. Fast forward to today. Some of us may not get as much hunting in and okay, I admit, maybe we can get a little chonky, but you can help keep us Healthy and active with EINs. Healthy Weight Cat food now available in stores and online.

[David Pierce]

All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-Verge 11. The email is vergecast to the verge.com I'm davidpierce11 on signal. Find us any way you want. I have threads dms now. I just downloaded the threads app for the first time and discovered a pile of dms. Sorry to everybody who's reached out that I haven't gotten back to. I have Threads DMS now. So get at me. Were easy to find. This week. Our hotline question, as so many of them have been these last few weeks, is about AI. Let me play it for you.

[Dax (Hotline Caller)]

Hey, David, this is Dax. So I work at a pretty big tech company, or a company that is pretty big, involved, pretty involved in tech. And so anyway, the point is I have to work on. I use AI models pretty much every day to help me with my code to automate stuff that I used to have to do manually. And that's all well and good, but often I'll be screen sharing with coworkers of mine and I realized they actually don't really know the basics of Mac os. Like, I had to show someone the other day how to like swipe up three fingers on a trackpad to go to mission control because they probably have never heard of that in their lives. And I think I had to tell them, here's how you make a new desktop and that's fine. I like to do that. But it made me realize that maybe, am I just like the weird one for knowing how these things work, or is there something to be said, I guess for a lot of tech companies hiring people to work with like Mac OS or Windows or any of these, you know, OS's that have been around for so long, and yet the people using those tools and using those new AI tools can't actually tell how to use something efficiently. You know what? I don't know. I've been echoing this all day. What point is, what good is a quad code workspace? Like workflow, automating, Like a bunch of stuff. If you have like five screenshots open a bunch of stuff all over your desktop, you know who you are. And like, you know, you don't have like multiple desktops. You just have one desktop with a bunch of things. I just, it drives me. I don't know, it's maybe it's like, maybe I'm thinking like abundance politics here. It's like, you know, abundance is like, you ought to make government work for you. Maybe I'm like, why don't I make my computer, my technology work for me? Otherwise what's the point? You know, I don't know.

[David Pierce]

Okay, I love this question with my whole heart. And if you know me or have followed anything that I do, you know that as a true, like, productivity, computer hack nerd, this speaks to me. So I have two big thoughts on this that I just wanted to share that this hotline question made me think about. Um, the first is this interview I did about two years ago with this woman named Laura Mae Martin, who was at the time the executive productivity advisor at Google, which is very cool title, but what it means essentially is she was like an internal consultant helping people be more productive inside of Google. And one of her biggest theories is that Everybody should spend 10 minutes, 10 minutes learning how to use their software. Like, she had this idea that maybe when you download an app, you should be required by the app to spend 10 minutes mucking around in the settings to get it set up the way that you want, or going through a really elaborate setup flow that actually teaches you all the features. It's the sort of thing that I think resonates with me still to this day because of questions like this, right? Most people don't know how to use most of their things, right? You set up slack, you learn the very bare minimum number of things required to slack successfully with your colleagues, and then you kind of never think about it again. And what you end up with is this weird mishmash of lots of tools that all kind of do the same thing but do it slightly differently. And you're not making full use of anything. So I think I am a big believer in actually it is worth taking the time to learn how something works. One thing I recommend to lots of people and to all of you is go to the YouTube channel of whatever app you download. Any sufficiently complicated piece of software these days seems to have a YouTube channel where they do a bunch of, you know, explainers, or they'll interview users about how they use the app. Raycast, which I think I've mentioned on the show a few times before, does a particularly good job of this notion. Does it really? Well, just like helping you understand what this app is and some reasonable, maybe non obvious, ways to use it. Do I think every piece of software should be a lot more obvious about how it works and how you can use it? Yes, but I also loathe the scourge that is like tool tips and pop ups telling you about all the new features and having it both ways is very hard. So I think spending a few minutes forcing yourself to spend a few minutes to say, okay, how does this thing work and what can I actually do in it goes an incredibly long way. This also happens to be a thing that AI is actually unusually well suited to do. One thing I think about AI is that it is very good at finding and reading and synthesizing the manual. And I mean the manual in like the broadest possible way, right? If you have a literal manual for a dishwasher, it can find things in that manual very quickly. I know this for a fact because my dishwasher sucks and this happens to me all the time. But you can also get an AI tool like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT to just give you a sense of what is possible inside of a tool. So like, one thing I've been doing a lot is just asking, you know, I need to do xyz. Here are, here are the apps that I use every day. Are any of these apps well suited to doing that thing? I need to, I need to a way to quickly text myself reminders. What's a good way to do that? And it'll actually be like, oh, actually Slack is very good at this because you can just set yourself reminders for Slack messages inside of Slack and it will send you reminders. Cool feature most people probably don't know about. Super useful. So asking a tool like this what is possible and how you can do things best with the tools you already have goes a long way towards starting to solve some of this problem. Right? And the thing like Mission Control on the Mac is really complicated because on the Mac there are a thousand ways to switch between apps, right? You can go to the Applications folder, you can go to the Dock, you can do Command Tab, you can do Mission Control, you can go to Launcher like it's feature creep in a way that I don't think is actually very useful. And in general, if you don't know Mission Control exists on the Mac, I don't know that your life is any worse or you're any worse at your using your computer. But if you are finding little tiny problems that you have things that you're doing over and over that don't feel right. Small things where you're like, how do I get from here to here? Why am I constantly, you know, copying and pasting? Why can't I find xyz? Those are good problems to work with chatbots on because a again, they're very good at finding needles in haystacks. Like, if. If AI large language models are good at one thing, it is searching through haystacks to find needles. You have to verify that the needle is real and correct. But it's very good at that process in a way that humans, I think are not. And frankly, it's not a good use of most people's time or a thing that I've discovered is that you can actually start to build tiny bits of software with some of these tools to solve some of these problems for you. In general, a thing that I need a lot is I need markdown links from web pages. Just a small thing I need. I'm constantly pasting them into other Google Docs where I want them better formatted than just like a bare link. There are a bunch of wacky tools and Chrome extensions and stuff for this. But in. In five minutes and like three prompts, I was able to make one of these with Claude code that now just sits on my computer and I just drag a link into it and it gives me a markdown link. Like, it's great. I drag a. I drag a tab, it gives me a markdown link in the clipboard. I put it wherever I need. Perfect. No notes. I spent a lot of time working on different kinds of productivity tools. Like, I got really excited about. I'm just gonna vibe code. My perfect productivity app that went terribly for reasons actually I should talk about on the show, but not here. But then I found something like there's this app called Raindrop, which is a bookmarking app that just lets you save links. Again, I don't know if you've noticed this. A lot of my life is just like moving links from one place to another. Raindrop is great. I think the app itself is really ugly. It's like really good, really stable infrastructure. It saves all the right stuff. It does everything you need. I just don't like looking at the app. But Raindrop has an API. So I just went to Claude code in this case and was like, hey, I don't like the way Raindrop looks, but I want to use the API. I'm a paid customer. I have all the access I need. Can you just build me a very quick, simple front end? And now I have a webpage that is literally just a super simple front end to Raindrop that just makes the thing look better and gives me the two keys I need in order to manage the links in my list. This is the scope of software that I think is really interesting for AI, for Most people like to sit down and say, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to rewrite my whole company's HR software so that we don't have to pay for it anymore. Like, saaspocalypse stuff is all fine and good and I think A, largely impossible for most people and B, largely irrelevant for most people. But the idea that you can build a little bookmarklet or a little menu bar app or a little tiny utility to accomplish something for you that you do all the time is real. I've done it over and over again and it works. And as long as the scope is pretty narrow and you're very clear on exactly what you need to do, these tools can do it. So I think to the extent that AI can actually help you A, figure out how to use your devices and B, kind of use them for you and start to solve some of the problems that your devices have, I think that's really powerful. I do believe everybody should spend some time looking at the settings menu, understanding how it works. Watch the YouTube videos, watch them at like 2x speed, even like breeze through a bunch of YouTube videos. But you'll just get a sense of sort of the list of features that exist that you can start to mess with and play with and think about. That is the stuff that I think goes a long way towards making your computing life better. We tend to sort of reinvent wheels over and over and try to build new tools because the existing tools don't quite work when, at least in my case, most of what it is is I don't completely understand how to use the existing tools or with some tiny tweaks, the existing tools can work. For me, that has made my computing life a lot easier. I find myself blowing everything up much less often and instead just doing little tiny tweaks. Also, I should just say, before we get out of here, shout out to Bixby. The Samsung AI assistant that many years ago was based on the idea that actually what your assistant on your phone should do is help you use your phone. It should make it so that you don't have to dig through the settings to find Bluetooth. It should make it so that you don't have to figure out where notification settings are and how to turn them off. It should make it so that you just tell your phone what you need it to do and it can take you there. That is a good and correct and right way for AI to work. And I think the tools that we have now are actually delivering on that idea that Bixby had a long time ago. My computer and the AI on my computer should help me use my computer, should teach me how to use my computer. And as much as they are learning how to use my computer for me, they should just take all of the steps in between me scrolling around and finding things and just take me where I need to be. These LLMs can do that, Claude can do that, Gemini can do that, ChatGPT can do that. It requires a little bit of trust in the system to allow it to sort of run rampant all over your computer. But at least in my case, so far it's been. It's been really great. So, you know, shout out to Bixby. You were right, just way too early and way too weird. Anyway, that's it for the show today. Thank you as always for watching and listening. Thank you to Allison for being here. Listening to my bonkers takes about phones. If you have thoughts about which phone I should have picked, if you're very upset with me for picking an iPhone, please know that A I understand and B I want to hear from you about why and what you think I got wrong. As always, the email is vergecastheverge.com, the hotline is 866 verge11 call email about anything and everything. The absolute love hearing from you. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. Nilai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news. We've got some Apple 50 next week stuff to tell you about to get ready for. Go listen to decoder. Go listen to the Verge cast. Go listen to version history. All of it's ad free if you subscribe to The Verge. The Verge.com subscribe We will see you next time. Rock and roll. Once upon a dismal day, Bob's ice

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

cream van looked gloomy and gray.

[David Pierce]

Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision.

[Allison Johnson]

That bad?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Maybe vamp it up a tad. I have an idea.

[David Pierce]

Bob launched Canva and got into gear. Create the video in the vampire theme

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

and make it the funniest meme. It went viral.

[David Pierce]

Bob's business a revival. Now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to [e-mail].